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We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

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Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#141

Post by umvi »

Klinky wrote: post #83
arcticbull wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure, so long as anti-nuclear campaigners continue to prevent the construction of Yucca Mountain, they can then continue to point to why we can't have nuclear because " where would we put the waste? " The only reason Yucca Mountain doesn't exist is because of anti-nuclear campaigners. It was funded and shovel-ready until 2010. Of course nuclear fuel has to be refined and mined, however the ecological impact is r…

NIMBYism is everywhere, even for solar and wind. Maybe it's a flaw of Nuclear that you have to stuff its waste in a giant pit inside a mountain. Uranium mining often uses leeching techniques, similar concerns to fracking and groundwater contamination, along with general mining hazards. Additionally rare-earth minerals are needed for a variety of things, even including components within a nuclear plant. I highly doubt…

> Maybe it's a flaw of Nuclear that you have to stuff its waste in a giant pit inside a mountain.

Every type of energy plant has wastes. Even wind turbine blades wear out and are dumped in landfills.[0]

The difference is that the nuclear waste eventually decays into nothing, while the fiberglass/plastic blades will stay around for thousands of years...

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#142

Post by manfredo »

Klinky wrote: post #41
arcticbull wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, one is the kind of waste you can drop a few oil drums of into Yucca Mountain and never have to worry about it again. On the other hand wind requires huge quantities of rare earth metals mined in open-air hellscapes in the far western reaches of China -- devastating the environment [1, 2]. So, why is it all mined in China you might ask, knowing rare earths are distributed all over the world? Specifically becau…

Yucca Mountain waste depot doesn't actually exist. You put it in holding pools indefinitely and wait for the DoE to superfund the site. Nuclear fuel does not have to be mined or go through costly and toxic refinement processes? Reprocessing waste creates even larger amounts of radioactive and toxic wastes. Nuclear is far far far away from being clean. It does allow for potentially better containment and concentration…

Yucca mountain a actually does exist. The tunnels have been bored out. It's just that congress blocked using the site. There wasn't much pushback, because this waste can be used as fuel for nuclear plants currently being built. Even if it were open it'd be a waste to put existing nuclear waste there at the moment.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#143

Post by piva00 »

melling wrote: post #56
aplummer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed

hey, we have been asking for 2 decades. Somewhere in the past year or so a lot of people have started saying “too late” Maybe you can humor the people who want nuclear while we continue to add solar and wind. The world needs a lot of electricity.

I long for the day we get a breakthrough with some next level power source. Be it fusion or some other thing to come.

Humanity always depended on having a leap in either: transport, communication or energy. We are going through a massive change in communication, if we get a cheap and super scalable and sustainable source of energy we might find our next leap...

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#144

Post by pfdietz »

manfredo wrote: post #138
pfdietz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some knowledge we gain is negative. We've learned nuclear wasn't as promising as had been claimed. More generally, in engineering most technologies must fail. That's because there are multiple technologies that can solve any given problem, and only one can come out on top. The number of niches If you think just wait, we'll learn more and nuclear wins, why doesn't that same argument apply to the technologies nuclear i…

You've got it backwards. We've built nuclear plants. We've encountered unknown difficulties and overcome them. Our cost estimates for nuclear power are historical estimates. We did built nuclear at scale before, and it did cost less. By comparison, the cost estimates for building things like massive amounts of energy storage are cost projections . These costs represent what we think these projects will cost. But thes…

Yes, we've built nuclear power plants. And we've discovered they are complex and expensive, and we've discovered they take forever to design, and that very often the construction process fails and the investment is lost.

Energy storage technologies have the property that they can rapidly iterate new designs, on a smaller scale than nuclear. They are inside nuclear's decision loop. The mammals are outbreeding the dinosaurs (yes, I know that metaphor is unfair to the actual animals).

There's a reason business people don't swallow the kind of BS you sling on nuclear, and it isn't because they're Greenpeace members.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#145

Post by manfredo »

sradman wrote: post #97

> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs... No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant accidents are unforgiving in boiling water reactors and quickly fail catastrophically (in the engineering sense). > the 1950s design CANDU reactor is small enough to be considered “modular” Ummm, no. I stood in front of reactor #4 at Darlington just before it w…

Yes, nuclear power is more expensive than natural gas. But natural gas still emits carbon dioxide. If our goal is to curtail climate change, then our goal is to decarbonize our economy. There are additional culprits too like methane and some refrigerants. But carbon dioxide accounts for the lion's share of climate change.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#146

Post by klyrs »

est31 wrote: post #92
DennisP wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can. However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

Nuclear power isn't very "dispatchable", it takes long times to be turned on vs off. But it might be useful for seasonal use in the winter when there is less sun.

https://www.usnc.com/

This is one of the most compelling nuclear plans I've seen. From the sound of it, these would be fine for intermittent power supply

Building a single one wouldn't be cheap, but the modular / standard design can benefit from economy of scale

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#147

Post by [deleted] »

melling wrote: post #56
aplummer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed

hey, we have been asking for 2 decades. Somewhere in the past year or so a lot of people have started saying “too late” Maybe you can humor the people who want nuclear while we continue to add solar and wind. The world needs a lot of electricity.

[deleted]

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#149

Post by arcticbull »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #137
arcticbull wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No my dude, you can find yourself on the other side of an argument without your opponents needing to be well-paid and delusional ;) Nuclear energy accounts for about 6% of the world's energy mix. It is the safest source of carbon-free energy in terms of deaths per TWh in the world, leading to half a many deaths as industrial solar, 1/4 as many as wind and 1/10th as many as rooftop solar. [1] The genuinely tiny amount…

> Nuclear energy accounts for about 6% of the world's energy mix. It is the safest source of carbon-free energy in terms of deaths per TWh in the world, ...as long as you completely ignore the risk of large catastrophic events. Like nuclear power plants being targeted during a war.

How about hydro dams? Bangqiao killed 200,000 people. There's plenty of things you can try and hit in war, and nuclear reactors aren't generally located near population centers. Nice thing about America and its enemies is it's (a) really hard to get to America and (b) its enemies can just lob their own nuclear weapons at America instead of hoping to hit Los Alamos.

If deathly fear of war were an issue we'd probably be building cities underground.

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